Free backup for premium Second Life accounts?

So I'm chatting in the Second Life Bloggers group and out pops a GREAT idea courtesy of Caitlin Poultry-Seale [aka Uccello Poultry]. Premium accounts should include inventory backups and roll-backs! What a concept!

Linden Lab, do you hear this? Sell more preemies by offering to back up inventory!

Second Life totally farkled!

In my 5 years on Second Life, I have NEVER seen it as totally screwed up as it is right now. I have no idea what's going on but for almost the whole day, people have been plagued by logins not working, teleports causing viewer crashes (wtf???), transactions failing, Marketplace deliveries not happening, objects rezzed disappearing and on and on and on. The grid warnings have turned from benign to ominous!

[Updated 3:23pm PDT 26 April 2012] Services are still undergoing maintenance - logins, billing, and other issues may occur. Some regions may be down intermittently. Please continue to refrain from rezzing no-copy objects, or transacting L$ or land. At this time, we do not have an estimated time of repair. Please continue to monitor this blog for updates.

[Updated 1:20pm PDT 26 April 2012] As maintenance continues please refrain from rezzing no copy objects, in-world transactions or land purchases etc.

[Updated 11:30am PDT 26 April 2012] Due to the ongoing maintenance, Marketplace orders may also be delayed. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue, please keep an eye on the blog for further updates.

Seriously Linden Lab, what the HELL did you do to SL today?

New Mesh Fashion Releases from Inga Wind

Usually I take photos of myself wearing the outfits that I feature here. This time, I'm just going to repost Inga Wind's own package photos. Her models and poses are totally cute and well-suited to the perky fun style of her latest offerings. Yes, I've tried them all on and they look as good if not better than the package shots.

Inga readily admits that the underlying meshes are templates so you may see the basic structure of the tops, skirts or whatevers show up elsewhere. It's what she does with her own textures that make these outfits sparkle. My two faves in this are Ashi and Katya. All are available in various color ways. Prices range from $300 - $400L but you can usually get them for 1/2 price if you belong to Inga's group "Wind". Click on the photo to see full-size.

SLURL to Inga Wind Clothing

SL9B = Linden Lab Fail

The word "fail" keeps coming up more and more with Linden Lab lately. The more recent truly epic fail has been the attempted switch to Direct Delivery in the Marketplace. (Merchants losing their products, items randomly switching pictures, perms changing, deliveries stopped -- yep just about everything bad has happened and continues to happen.)

So when you're already in a hole with your customers (the citizens of Second Life), what do you do? Naturally, Linden Lab brought in the earthmovers and started digging themselves in deeper.

In case you don't know, SL_B (Second Life # Birthday) has been a yearly event sponsored by Linden Lab focusing on resident builds and creative stuff. Yeah sometimes it gets laggy and a bit too commercial but that's just a reflection of SL in general. The key thing is that Linden Lab has always donated the 20+ sims needed to make it happen so everything can be in one place.

But, WTH? This year we were greeted with an announcement by teh Lab that this year's SL9B was just going to be a collection of special event notices and that oops, residents, you're on your own. If you want to do something in "celebration" of Second Life's 9th year, then you have to supply the resources, sims (tier), etc., etc.

So here's the announcement:

Help us celebrate Second Life's 9th Birthday

Which was immediately met with a longgggg thread in the SL Forums:

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Upcoming-Events-and-Activities/The-SL9B-Fail/td-p/1489323

And after that went on for about 25 messages, we got this:

A tone-deaf response by Linden Lab

Condescending spin is what it comes across as to me. Let's get real. I think LL is looking at the bottom line and saying, "let's cheap out" and force the bandwidth and resources required back on those who are already paying for it rather than, god forbid, give something back to our customers. You know, the ones who pay for tier, premium memberships, $L, merchandise and everything else that floats their paychecks.

Kind of like, so long and thanks for all the fish. Anyway, those are my thoughts.

Crap Mariner has a different take on it.

April 1 Redux

I had completely forgotten about this article from two years ago until my friend Toysoldier Thor reminded me about it today. Worth another giggle I think.


http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2010/04/second-life-mother-files-for-child.html